Features Editor Sean Mackay is holding a reusable black grocery bag. So far, it contains a couple of empty cigarette packages and an empty coffee cup. Associate Arts Editor, Ariel Lewis, picks up a crumpled newspaper that has been frozen into a snow pile and waves it at Sean. He declines the offering. The ice would melt, we muse, and we can pick it up on the way back to The Varsity office.
It’s Sunday, January 23, one of the coldest days of the winter thus far. Bundled up, and unable to discuss anything beyond the weather for long, seven Varsity staff members and friends engage in an experiment. I’ve pulled everyone out of their hung-over stupor on this Sunday afternoon because I want to know if in an afternoon of prowling the streets for interesting bits of litter, we can become artists.
Yes, But Who Is Victor? by Emily Kellogg
Found art is defined as an artifact that was originally produced without artistic intent, which has been proclaimed as art. These objects can be anything. The concept of ‘found art’ was introduced to the artistic canon in 1917 when Marcel Duchamp submitted the piece Fountain anonymously to a major exhibition. The piece was simply a urinal, turned ninety degrees and signed ‘R. Mutt.’ Unsurprisingly, the piece was rejected from the exhibition.
In 2004, five hundred British art professors named Fountain the most influential piece of the twentieth Century.
The concept of found art is absurd and seemingly arbitrary. Are the pieces of garbage we’re grabbing from the streets art? The answer would seem to be yes — so long as we call it art. For proponents of the artistic form, the absurdity of it all is inherent to the art itself. The idea is that found art draws attention to the definition of art. When creating found art, mastery or skill is no longer important. Instead, the simple act of presenting these objects as art is enough to transform a discarded coffee cup into something worthy of being photographed and printed in the pages of The Varsity.
Tabla Mandala by Simon Frank
The faces of minor celebrities stare at us through tabloid newspapers. Who are they? What are they famous for? Who knows? Who cares? Through repetition the absurdity is heightened.
We continue down Bloor Street. We probably look like an odd cross between environmentalist city-cleaners and treasure hunters. I’ve instructed the rest of the group to pick up empty cigarette packages wherever they see them — I don’t have an art piece in mind, but I can’t help but notice that the empty packaging is everywhere. We all get strangely excited when we find a piece of interesting litter and crowd around it in impromptu moments of show-and-tell.
We stop in front of The Brunswick House and pick up a half-empty box of cake, an empty can of RedBull and a McDonald’s cup with a cigarette butt frozen into left-over Coca-Cola. It all goes into Sean’s black bag.
Things Found In Front of The Brunswick House by Sophia Costomiris
Taxi. 3am. January. Three guys drunk, shit man. Must they beat the cold of the past until a cocktail whispers: Gee, sex can have feeling. She was pushed from hope. Sex each other. Chest out. Skirt him. Melted me. Spilled being.
It’s easy to make fun of found art. It epitomizes of one of the most frustrating aspects of contemporary art, which I like to call the “But, I could do that!!!” phenomenon. It’s that moment when you see a canvas with one black dot hanging on the wall of the AGO, give it a bewildered and derisive look, and murmur to yourself that you could have created that piece. If you had, you could have sold it at an auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and maybe then you wouldn’t be in so much debt from student loans.
Keep “Christ” in Christmas//Collaborative
A comment on the absurdity of the ‘Christmas’ purists.
So does that mean that all of us are artists and that everything is art? Worse still — does it mean that everything considered ‘high’ art is an arbitrarily valued commodity that ultimately means nothing more than the random assortment of objects you interact with on a daily basis?
We head back to the office with a bag full of flyers, old coffee cups, free magazines, a brick, a pine cone, a headband, bits of paper, a tray, an empty bottle of tea, knives, out-dated posters, frozen sodas, sugar packages, a piece of plywood, and religious pamphlets. It all used to be garbage. Now, it’s art.
Intelligista Hysteria by Brigit Katz
It’s post-modern.
When you are forced to go into a non-artistic space, using non-artful objects and create art — you start looking at things a little bit differently. Trash is still trash. (Trash will always be trash.) But the trash you put into that black bag is going to have to turn into art in one way or another. So yes, trash is still trash — but it’s also a kind of potential. You start looking at everything just a little bit differently, and while it might just be a matter of noticing these little discarded objects on the street for the first time, I think it just might be more than that. I think the seven of us might have had a kind of collective artistic experience.
So no, I’m not going to make the claim that any one of us created great art on Sunday afternoon. But still, I’m going to say that we did make art, and that makes all seven of us artists. And somehow, I don’t predict that a bunch of learned British old guys are going to name me the most influential artist of our age for my pyramid of empty cigarette packages.
Passive-Aggressive Roommates by Will Sloan
Two roommates who slept together once six months ago, but haven’t spoken about it.
That saying floating around, “In the future, everyone will be an artist”, well, I think it’s true. I just think that an appendix should be added. “And in that future, not everyone will be a good artist.”
Class of 2011 by Sean MacKay
The seemingly neverending cycle of cramming and caffeine represented through the circular shape of the coffee cup.
